nuclear-news

It’s March 2 at an event marking Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day, and the boy in the shallows is now the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, which has entered the 21st century as part trust-fund baby, part welfare state. Its elders have endured burns that reached to the bone, forced relocation, nightmarish birth defects, cancers in the short and long term. Its young people have inherited a world unmade, remade and then virtually forgotten by Washington, D.C.

The victims of the tests “have been taken from us before their time,” deBrum says, so that Americans could learn more about the “effects of such evil and unnecessary devices.”

From 1946 to 1958, the United States conducted 67 tests in the Marshall Islands. If their combined explosive power was parceled evenly over that 12-year period, it would equal 1.6 Hiroshima-size explosions per day.

This is not something one gets over quickly.

Payday at Bikini Jack’s“Washington — and this is just my personal opinion — I think they’re going out of their way to wash their hands of the Marshalls,” says Jack Niedenthal, a Pennsylvanian who arrived in the islands with the Peace Corps in 1981 and eventually became one of their unofficial representatives to the United States. “You look at what they spend on Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s billions upon billions. For four bullets into a tree in Iraq, they could fix this entire place.”……

The RMI, as the republic is called, is both vast and slight. There are 1,200 islands — spread out over a chunk of ocean the size of Mexico — whose combined land area is roughly equivalent to D.C.’s. American arrogance and American generosity collide here, and paradox reigns. It was once called the most contaminated place on Earth, yet it has the dizzy beauty of a mirage. Wealthy foreigners spirit themselves to surfer paradise, past islanders living with sky-high rates of diabetes and thyroid abnormalities. In a place where the United States has sunk billions, children play in landfills. The Marshallese couldn’t exist without the ocean, but now sea-level rise attributed to global warming imperils their homes and lives.

Seven thousand miles away is Washington, its tough-love parent, delivering an annual allowance for the RMI’s operations while trying to close the book on a history of destruction and sadness. The United States has been an epic force here for 70 years, and decisions made over the next decade could save the islands or seal their fate……

A chosen people

On a Sunday after church in 1946, a Navy commodore met with the people of Bikini Atoll and told them they were like the Israelites, a chosen people, and that perfecting the atomic bomb would deliver mankind from future wars. Within one month of that conversation, the Bikinians had boarded U.S. ships for relocation. Within five, the first two tests had been conducted.

“We located the one spot on Earth that hadn’t been touched by the war and blew it to hell,” Bob Hope reportedly once said.

“Paradise Lost” with Lijon Eknilang – Marshall Islands

The Marshallese culture is rooted in a history of resource sharing, ecological balance, of an intimate knowledge of how the winds blow, how the waves break, how the stars slip across the sky. Over the past 70 years, though, victimhood, corruption and dependency have produced a different kind of fallout.

“We have basically destroyed a culture,” says Glenn Alcalay, an anthropology professor at New Jersey’s Montclair State University who took part in Greenpeace’s second evacuation of Rongelap in 1985. “We’ve stolen their future. When you take the future from a people, you’ve destroyed them.”…….

cancer and birth defects are the modern connections to the past. There are still radiation-related cancers that have yet to develop or be diagnosed in the population of Marshallese who were on the islands between 1948 and 1970, according to a 2004 report by the U.S. National Cancer Institute. Everyone seems to have a relative whose cancer falls on the Energy Department’s list of ailments traceable to radiation…..http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/11/27/a-ground-zero-forgotten/